


Signs from God, & Other Lessons

by TheColorBlue



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Gen, Native American Character(s), depictions of violence appropriate to the game, mixed race Booker DeWitt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 11:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Booker Dewitt: his childhood in an Indian boarding school, the massacre at Wounded Knee, and waking up on the shores of Battleship Bay in Columbia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Signs from God, & Other Lessons

Once upon a time, when Booker DeWitt was a little boy, he lived with his mother’s people, the Lakota Sioux; then his father, a white man, took him away to be educated in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota. Booker stayed there long enough to learn how to read and write in English, and to learn what it meant to be punished for speaking the language that meant _home_. At night, when he lay curled up in the cot in the boy’s dormitory, he’d hear his mother’s voice in his head, telling him all the familiar stories with all the familiar words. During the day, he would be slapped and pinched by the school instructors and matrons for slipping up and not speaking in English. When he came home, on holidays, his father beat him if he spoke Sioux. 

It’s funny, the things he learned from boarding school.

He learned how to read and write.

He learned how to scavenge in garbage for scraps of food; they fed you enough so as you didn’t starve, but Booker, a growing child, was always hungry. He was always hungry, and he learnt how to steal food off other children’s plates, and he learned how to fight. He learned how to fight dirty.

He knew that his mother would have been ashamed of him, shamed for him, if she had seen. 

Booker DeWitt learned that there was a lot in his life to be ashamed of, and he buckled under the weight of it. 

Booker learned about the Christian religion. 

He learned about a God that created the world, and man given mastery over all beasts. He learned about Jesus, who came to earth to save all sinners, and how all men were tainted with sin. 

\---

In 1890, U.S. armed forces descended on Wounded Knee. There was talk about the Ghost Dance religious movement. There was talk about how these pagan Indian practices were really revealing Indians banding together for militant reasons, but Booker wouldn’t have known anything about that. As a soldier, he kept his head down. He had not spoken to his mother in years. He tried to forget the stories and the legacy that he had grown up with as a child. He was a white man now. 

At Wounded Knee, Booker learned about fear. 

Fear, many of his compatriots supposed, would be expressed by the unwillingness to inflict violence on others. 

When the sergeant accused his family tree of “sheltering a teepee or two,” Booker felt fear grip his heart. 

Funny, how it was fear that incited him to lift the torches to the teepees of innocent families, his hands damp with cold sweat, and his chest feeling tight and heavy as a stone. 

Funny, how it was fear that incited him to look down at the freshly slain, then take his knife to their scalps, carving away grisly trophies to show off to his compatriots. None of his mother’s people had ever boasted of scalping their enemies. When he was done, Booker was covered with blood, his hands slick with it, his shirt and trousers soaked through and stinking. 

At least, he thought numbly, he could no longer see their faces. 

\---

When his wife died, at the tender age of sixteen, it would seem like a sign from God. 

Booker had loved her. 

He had _truly_ loved her. 

He had taken no pleasure in lying with her, the way that a man ought to have, when lying with a woman (another of his, perhaps, more petty sins)—but his wife had been so… She had been lovely. Gentle and kind and good. 

And then she was dead, leaving only little Anna DeWitt, and then too Booker allowed Anna to be taken away from him…

\---

When Booker DeWitt woke up, on the shores of Battleship Bay, the sun shining down through pristine clouds and the transparent blue—it had seemed, for a moment, almost like heaven. 

Except, Booker knew, and wiping the sand from his face, that was impossible. There was no heaven for a man like him, he knew. Not for someone with a soul as damaged and ugly as his. 

While he watched Elizabeth skip rocks on the surf, he ate a sandwich he’d stolen from someone’s unattended picnic basket. He thought about the killings of that day. He thought about the monstrous Songbird, and falling through the sky. He thought about the beachgoers lounging under parasols, about the sound of the waves, and about the man who had seen his red necktie, and then leered at him, knowingly. He thought about women twittering at his back, and the salt and sand in his shoes, and about that entire, impossible day. He watched the way the bay disappeared into the sky.

For a moment, he wanted to forget gunfire and gambling debts and stealing an innocent girl away to New York—the same way that he had forgotten his mother and her stories and a childhood among people who were not white.

Except he couldn’t. 

If he closed his eyes, he could still hear his mother’s voice in his head, speaking the familiar words. He could still hear the screams of the innocent, burning alive. 

He could have killed kin that day.

Even without knowing their names or faces, it didn’t matter, _he did kill kin_.

Elizabeth had taken off her shoes and dipped her toes into the water of the bay. 

She was young, and innocent. 

He could take her to Paris.

 _He could_.

Except the same ugly, shameful, sickening _fear_ still gripped his heart and he knew: he wouldn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> Research for this was a bit [here and there and everywhere](http://magickedteacup.tumblr.com/post/61092601645/spending-ridiculous-amount-of-time-doing-research) using Bing, Wikipedia, and Project Gutenberg; the details about the boarding school were actually drawn from my reading the book [Codetalker](http://www.amazon.com/Code-Talker-Memoir-Original-Talkers/dp/0425247856), which has bits talking about Navajo boarding schools in the 1920's; Booker's experiences were therefore a bit extrapolation and guesswork, but I do know that in his time period they were starting with the whole assimilatiing Native Americans culturally via boarding schools routine.
> 
> The bit about the red necktie refers to how the red necktie was [often worn in certain areas of New York](http://magickedteacup.tumblr.com/post/56918180684/ravioli-ravioli-your-opinion-is-wrongioli) to indicate homosexual proclivities.


End file.
